Timothy Wilken
In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus challenged the view that the Sun revolved around the earth, arguing instead that the earth revolved around the Sun. His paper led to a revolution in thinking-to a new worldview. Eco-Economy discusses the need today for a similar shift in our worldview.
The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Brown argues the latter, pointing out that treating the environment as part of the economy has produced an economy that is destroying its natural support systems.
Brown notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million barrels of oil a day-more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world’s forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it won’t work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world-and it will not work for the rest of the world.
But Brown is optimistic as he describes how to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the earth’s ecosystem so that economic progress can continue.
In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, and the bicycle network of the Netherlands.
Eco-Economy is a roadmap of how to get from here to there. The following is excerpted from the Foreword.
Lester R. Brown
The idea for this book came to me just over a year ago, shortly after I moved from President to Chairman of the Board of the Worldwatch Institute, an organization I founded in 1974. In this new role and with more time to think, three things became more apparent to me. One, we are losing the war to save the planet. Two, we need a vision of what an environmentally sustainable economy–an eco-economy–would look like. And three, we need a new kind of research organization–one that offers not only a vision of an eco-economy, but also frequent assessments of progress in realizing that vision.
When Worldwatch started 27 years ago, we were worried about shrinking forests, expanding deserts, eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, and disappearing species. We were just beginning to worry about collapsing fisheries. Now the list of concerns is far longer, including rising carbon dioxide levels, falling water tables, rising temperatures, rivers running dry, stratospheric ozone depletion, more destructive storms, melting glaciers, rising sea level, and dying coral reefs.
Over this last quarter-century or so, many battles have been won, but the gap between what we need to do to arrest the environmental deterioration of the planet and what we are doing con-tinues to widen. Somehow we have to turn the tide.
At present there is no shared vision even within the environmental community, much less in society at large. Unless we have such a vision of where we want to go, we are not likely to get there. The purpose of this book is to outline the vision of an eco-economy.
The good news is that when we started Worldwatch, we knew that an environmentally sustainable economy was possible, but we only had an abstract sense of what it would look like. Today we can actually describe with some confidence not only what it will look like but how it will work. Twenty-seven years ago, the modern wind power industry had not yet been born. Now, world-wide, we have behind us a phenomenal decade of 24 percent annual growth.
Thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Wind Resources Inventory, we now know that North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. In the United States, wind electric generation is projected to grow by more than 60 percent in 2001. With the low-cost electricity that comes from wind turbines, we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, the fuel of choice for the fuel cell engines that every major automobile manufacturer is now working on.
Wind turbines are replacing coal mines in Europe. Denmark, which has banned the construction of coal-fired power plants, now gets 15 percent of its electricity from wind. In some communities in northern Germany, 75 percent of the electricity needs are satisfied by wind power.
A generation ago we knew that silicon cells could convert sunlight into electricity, but the solar roofing material developed in Japan that enables rooftops to become the power plants of build-ings was still in the future. Today more than 1 million homes world-wide get their electricity from solar cells.
Today major corporations are committed to comprehensive recycling, to closing the loop in the materials economy. STMicroelectronics in Italy and Interface in the United States, a leading manufacturer of industrial carpet, are both striving for zero carbon emissions. Shell Hydrogen and DaimlerChrysler are working with Iceland to make it the world’s first hydrogen-powered economy.
What became apparent to me in my reflections a year ago was that to achieve these goals, we need a new kind of research institute. Thus in May of this year, with fellow incorporators Reah Janise Kauffman and Janet Larsen, I launched the Earth Policy Institute. Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth is our first book. We have also begun issuing Earth Policy Alerts, four-page pieces dealing with topics such as worldwide wind power development and the dust bowl that is forming in northwest China. These pieces highlight trends that affect our movement toward an eco-economy.
No one I know is qualified to write a book of this scope. Certainly I am not, but someone has to give it a try. Every chapter could have been a book in its own right. Indeed, individual sections of chapters have been the subject of books. Beyond the range of issues covered, an analysis that integrates across fields of knowledge is not easy, particularly when it embraces ecology and economics– two disciplines that start with contrasting premises.
People appear hungry for a vision, for a sense of how we can reverse the environmental deterioration of the earth. More and more people want to get involved. When I give talks on the state of the world in various countries, the question I am asked most frequently is, What can I do? People recognize the need for action and they want to do something. My response is always that we need to make personal changes, involving everything from using bicycles more and cars less to recycling our daily newspapers. But that in itself will not be enough. We have to change the system. And to do that, we need to restructure the tax system, reducing income taxes and increasing taxes on environmentally destructive activities so that prices reflect the ecological truth. Anyone who wants to reverse the deterioration of the earth will have to work to restructure taxes.
This book is not the final word. It is a work in progress. We will continue to unfold the issues, update the data, and refine the analysis. … We welcome your input in analyzing these issues. If you have any thoughts or recent papers or articles that you would like to share with us, we would be delighted to receive them.
Download Eco-Economy for free. (Requires Adobe Acrobat). Read the press release.